The View from the Cheap Seats (35 page)

“I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean.”

H
i, by the way.

I met her first on a tape, and then we spoke on the phone late at night, and then one night I went to see her play piano and sing.

It was a tiny Notting Hill brasserie, and Tori had already started when I got there. She saw me come in and smiled like the lighting of a beacon, played “Tear in Your Hand” to welcome me in. The room was almost empty, save for the owner, who was having his birthday meal in the middle of the room. Tori sang “Happy Birthday to You,” then a song she'd recently written called “Me and a Gun,” pure and dark and alone.

Later, we went off through Notting Hill and talked like old friends who are meeting for the very first time. On the empty subway platform she sang and danced and acted out the video she had made that day for “Silent All These Years”—one moment she was a Tori in a box, spinning around, the next a small girl dancing past a piano . . .

That was several years ago.

I know Tori a little better now than I did that night, but the wonderment she inspired then has not faded with time or with familiarity.

Tori doesn't ever ring me. She sends me strange messages by other means, and I have to track her down in odd countries, negotiate my way through foreign switchboards. The last time
she wanted to tell me that they served great pumpkin ice cream in the place across from the recording studio, a continent away.

She offered to save me some.

And she wanted to tell me she sings about me on
Under the Pink
. “What do you sing?” I asked.

“‘Where's Neil when you need him?'” she said.

Tori is wise and witchy and wickedly innocent. What you see is what you get: a little delirium, a lot of delight. There's fairy blood inside her,
^*
and a sense of humor that shimmers and illuminates and turns the world upside down.

She sings like an angel and rocks like a red-haired demon.

She's a small miracle. She's my friend.

I don't know where I am when you need me. I hope the pumpkin ice cream doesn't melt before I find out . . .

I wrote this for the tour book for Tori Amos's
Under the Pink
tour, in 1994.

R
iding a train through America I'm seeing a side of the country it prefers to keep hidden: it's truly the world on the wrong side of the tracks, a world of tumbledown tarpaper shacks, abandoned cars and boarded-up buildings. Now—as I type this—I'm somewhere in North Texas, riding the train through a swamp, watching an eagle circle and the play of light through the dusty leaves. I'm listening to Tori going to Venus and back.

“Suede,” she sings, music swirling around her voice like eddies in the current of the swamp-river. “Anybody knows you can conjure anything by the dark of the moon.” It's a song like black chocolate and woodsmoke, shimmering and remote. “Suede,” she sings.

It's too hot outside, but winter is becoming imaginable once more. Summer is rotting in a haze like a neglected peach. The album plays over and over.

Remembering the first time I heard these songs, in early summer: I had spent the day in Dartmoor, visiting friends (Terri's Pre-Raphaelite cottage, with its magic kitchen and elegant messages written in gold on every wall; wandering the Frouds' house, made even more otherworldly by the fact that they weren't actually there, just Brian's paintings and Wendy's elfish dolls smiling and leering at you from every corner of their
concertina-maze of a world). I had fetched up in Martian Studios at the end of the day like a stray puppy in need of a home.

Outside the train window now: a wall of red earth strewn with a hundred glass bottles; a seat ripped from a school bus alone under a tree; pines and willows and a vast tangle of wild honeysuckle.

“What red wine is this?” I asked Tori, that night, when the world was quiet and dark.

“I'll send you a bottle,” she said. It was a marvelous wine, gentle and wise.

Sharing secrets on the sofa: I told her of the
baku,
and the fox and the monk. She played me the new album, told me its secrets and its stories, “Lust” and “Bliss,” apologizing for a rawness of the mix (which I believed but could not hear), and I settled back and listened.

The curious wine made me expansive. I imagined the story I would write about it: I would tell the tale of each song through descriptions of twelve imaginary albums.

It is a greatest hits album, I told her, from an alternate universe.

Of course it is, she said.

I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean, and at the end of it I slept on the sofa, rag-doll floppy from the fine red wine, dreaming of the glory of the eighties and wondering why I had never noticed it at the time.

Traveling still now: passing a sudden thunderstorm in the hills of New Mexico; then the stately Californian windmill fields and hills signal that the train is leaving the real America and entering the world of the imagination.

And I meant to tell you about my Happy Phantom dream, and how she smiled and said, “I know I'm dead, but why are they making such a fuss about it!” and to talk about the way that she smiled. But we're pulling into Los Angeles now, and it's time to stop writing.

And I'm drunk on a curious wine I tasted several months ago, having traveled to Venus and back.

The introduction for Tori Amos's
To Venus and Back
tour book, 1999.

N
ot to put too fine a point on it, I was, in my mind, already too old for music to matter, too old for an album to change me and definitely too old to buy singles. I was twenty-eight, driving to Gatwick airport when I heard “Birdhouse in Your Soul” on the radio, and it changed my life. And this is the odd thing: I didn't listen to music radio. Then, as now, it was Radio 4, or cassette tapes. But I was listening to music radio as I drove, and “Birdhouse in Your Soul” came on, and I made a mental note and remembered the name of the band—
They Might Be Giants,
just like the film, where George C. Scott thinks he is Sherlock Holmes (the title comes from a conversation about Don Quixote, who fought a windmill thinking it was a giant—and what if he was right?).

When I got to London I went straight to a record shop, and bought everything they had by They Might Be Giants (
Lincoln,
and
They Might Be Giants
). They didn't have “Birdhouse in Your Soul.”
Flood
had not come out yet.

What I loved about They Might Be Giants was that they made stories. The words were put together in a way that left holes I needed to fill in order to know what was going on. I became, whether I liked it or not, a part of the songs.

I called Terry Pratchett, because he loved stories too, and told him that I'd found something he'd like better than chocolate.
“Shoehorn with Teeth” became the theme song of the
Good Omens
signing tour. When we were under stress, we would sing it together. We were under stress a lot.

I bought “Birdhouse . . .” as a single, the first CD single I'd bought. There was an Ant on there too, crawling up someone's back in the nighttime.

I bought
Flood
as soon as it arrived in the shops. In a break from They Might Be Giants tradition it didn't sound like it had been recorded in someone's back room. There were guest instrumentalists, a lush sound, strange samples. It still sounded like They Might Be Giants, but this time they were bigger giants.

The songs were, for the most part, dispatches from an alternate universe, slices from stories and lives we would never quite know. That didn't stop me thinking about them, though, or making up my own tiny stories to go with them.

It was the first album to come with its own theme, for a start. The world would end, but that was all right, because this album had begun. Yes. It had “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” a song by a proud night-light who is descended from a lighthouse. It had “Lucky Ball and Chain,” which looked back on an unusual marriage.

It had “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which I was sad to discover had never been performed as a sand dance by Wilson, Keppel and Betty. It had “Dead” on it, a song about final things and the meaning of life. “Your Racist Friend,” which comes into my head whenever I find myself having a conversation with anyone who begins a sentence with “I'm not a racist, but . . .”

It had “Particle Man” on it, finest of all superheroes. Terry Pratchett liked “Particle Man” so much that he put a watch with an Aeon Hand in it in one of his stories, which I thought was very unfair, because I had wanted to steal the idea for a story myself.

“Twisting” made me sad—I was certain there was a suicide in there somewhere. “We Want a Rock” was surreal in the best sense: it only made sense if taken literally, and then it gained
a dream-sense. Perhaps everybody does want a prosthetic forehead, after all.

I think that “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” is really called Mr. Horrible, and I am afraid of the Ugliness Man.

It had “Hearing Aid” on it. A song with an electric chair in it that somehow seemed to be filled with sweetness and gentle age.

“Minimum Wage” put visions of stampedes in my head, with the cowboys all carrying placards. “Letterbox” was the kind of tiny horror movie in a box I loved, its lyrics all tumbly and twisted.

“Whistling in the Dark” is what we all wind up doing, after meeting people who are not unkind, but still leave scars.

“Hot Cha” never will come back. The prodigal son will remain uneaten.

“Women and Men” was an Escher drawing in my head. The lyrics unpacked to contain the lyrics, the people will cross the ocean into the jungle forever. “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” is a perfect phrase, almost as beautiful as “cellar door,” and it is up on the screen in my mind in a movie of black and white and sapphire blue.

They Might Be Giants wrote a song for themselves, and it explains the band's name and everything else about them. Hold on to the merry-go-round.

We are all in a “Road Movie to Berlin.” Or at least, we are all in a road movie, and some of us will wind up in Berlin in 1989, if we just keep going.

And now it's the future, and
Flood
came out a long, long time ago. The floodwaters are still rising, along with the ocean levels. Some things never go out of style.

Liner notes for the twenty-fifth-anniversary release of They Might Be Giants'
Flood
LP.

“T
here are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too.” That was what Lou Reed told me in 1991.

I'm a writer. I write fiction, mostly. People ask me about my influences, and they expect me to talk about other writers of fiction, so I do. And sometimes, when I can, I put Lou Reed on the list too, and nobody ever asks what he's doing there, which is good because I don't know how to explain why a songwriter is responsible for so much of the way I view the world.

His songs were the soundtrack to my life: a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope, those tiny perfect days and nights we want to last forever, important because they are so finite and so few; songs filled with people, some named, some anonymous, who strut and stagger and flit and shimmy and hitchhike into the limelight and out again.

It was all about stories. The songs implied more than they told: they made me want to know more, to imagine, to tell those stories myself. Some of the stories were impossible to unpack,
others, like “The Gift,” were classically constructed short stories. Each of the albums had a personality. Each of the stories had a narrative voice: often detached, numb, without judgment.

Trying to reconstruct it in my head: it wasn't even the music that sucked me in, initially, as much as it was a 1974
NME
interview I read when I was thirteen that hooked me. The opinions, the character, the street-smarts, his loathing of the interviewer. He was in the
Sally Can't Dance
phase, drugged out, the most commercially successful and most mocked album of his career. I wanted to know who Lou Reed was, so I bought and borrowed everything I could, because the interview was about stories, and stories that would become songs.

I was a Bowie fan, which meant that I had bought or borrowed
Transformer
when I was thirteen, and then someone handed me an acetate of
Live at Max's Kansas City
and now I was a Lou Reed fan and a Velvet Underground fan. I looked for everything I could. I hunted through record shops. Lou Reed's music was the soundtrack to my teenage years.

When I was sixteen and had my first breakup with a girlfriend, I played
Berlin
over and over until my friends worried about me. Also, I walked in the rain a lot.

I was willing to sing in a punk band in 1977 because, I decided, you didn't have to be able to sing to sing. Lou did just fine with whatever voice he had. You just had to be willing to tell stories in song.

Brian Eno said that only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out, but they all formed bands. That may have been true. But some of us listened to
Loaded
over and over and we wrote stories.

I'd see Lou's songs surface in the stories I read. William Gibson wrote a short story called “Burning Chrome,” which is his take on a Velvet Underground song called “Pale Blue Eyes.”
Sandman,
the comic that made my name, would not have hap
pened without Lou Reed.
Sandman
celebrates the marginalized, the people out on the edges, and in grace notes that run through it; partly in the huger themes: Morpheus, Dream, the eponymous Sandman, has one title that means more to me than any other. He's the Prince of Stories too, a title I stole from “I'm Set Free” (
I've been blinded but now I can see / What in the world has happened to me? / The prince of stories who walked right by me
).

When I needed to write a
Sandman
story set in Hell I played Lou's
Metal Machine Music
(which I've described as “four sides of tape hum, on the kinds of frequencies that drive animals with particularly sensitive hearing to throw themselves off cliffs and cause blind unreasoning panic in crowds”) all day for two weeks. It helped.

The things he sang about were transgressive, always on the edge of what you could say: people pointed to the mention of oral sex in “Walk on the Wild Side,” but the easy gender changes were more important in retrospect, the casual way that
Transformer
took nascent gay culture and made it mainstream.

Lou Reed's music stayed part of my life, whatever else was happening.

I named my daughter Holly after Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, whom I'd discovered in “Walk on the Wild Side.” When Holly was nineteen I made her a playlist of songs she had loved as a small girl, the ones she'd remembered and the ones she'd forgotten, which led to our having the Conversation. I dragged songs from her childhood over to the playlist—“Nothing Compares 2 U” and “I Don't Like Mondays” and “These Foolish Things” and then came “Walk on the Wild Side.” “You named me from this song, didn't you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Lou started singing.

Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “‘Shaved her legs and then he was a she' . . . ?
He
?”

“That's right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having the Conversation. “You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.”

She grinned like a light going on. “Oh, Dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I'd just said down on the back, in case she forgot it. I'm not sure that I'd ever expected the Conversation to go quite like that.

I interviewed Lou Reed in 1991, over the phone. He was in Germany, about to go onstage. He was interested, engaged, smart. Really smart. He'd published a collection of lyrics, with notes. They felt like a novel.

A year or so later, I had dinner with him, with my publisher at DC Comics. Lou wanted to make
Berlin
into a graphic novel. He was hard work at dinner: prickly, funny, opinionated, smart and combative: you had to prove yourself. My publisher mentioned that she had been a friend of Warhol's and faced a third degree from Lou to prove that she had actually been a real friend. Before he talked to me about comics he gave me something approaching an oral examination on 1950s EC Horror comics, and challenged me on using a phrase of his in an issue of
Miracleman
I'd written. I told him I'd learned more about Warhol's voice from Lou's lyrics in
Songs for Drella
than I had from all the biographies I'd read, all the Warhol diaries, and Lou seemed satisfied.

I had passed the exam, but wasn't interested in taking it twice and anyway, I'd been around long enough to know that the person isn't the art. Lou Reed, Lou told me, was a persona he used to keep people at a distance. I was happy to keep my distance. I went back to being a fan, happy to celebrate the magic without the magician.

I'm sad today. Friends of his are sending me brokenhearted e-mails. The world is darker. Lou knew about days like this, as well. “There's a bit of magic in everything,” he told us, “and then some loss to even things out.”

Originally published in the October 28, 2013, issue of the
Guardian
. I wrote it on the train between London and Bristol, the day after I learned Lou was dead, and I borrowed from the interview/article I did in 1991. I've now taken most of those bits out, as that article is the next thing in this book, but some sentences might seem familiar.